


like a second skeleton

by thestarkinwinterfell



Category: Teen Wolf (TV)
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-07-07
Updated: 2012-07-07
Packaged: 2017-11-09 08:44:37
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,233
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/453578
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thestarkinwinterfell/pseuds/thestarkinwinterfell





	like a second skeleton

Lydia is the first to arrive. After all these years, she’s still more punctual than the rest of them. She stops on the porch to check her makeup, but with her hand buried in her purse she forgets what she is looking for. The moment slips away; the tips of her fingers brush a tube of lip gloss and come away sticky. She knocks.

 

The door swings open too quickly, and the awkwardness hangs heavy between Stiles’s beaming face and hers.

 

‘Hi,’ she says quietly, and steps over the threshold into Derek’s home as though it really can be this easy, as though five years have not grown and festered between them, as if none of them had ever left.

 

‘Hi,’ he replies. Lydia never would have pegged him for a carpenter, but in the years since she’s last seen him, that is what he has done. The house shines and sparkles; the banisters gleam; the walls are solid coats of heavy cream. She follows him into the living room, which smells of apples and a warm oven and something cooking. She realizes that Stiles is wearing an oven mit.

 

‘Have a seat,’ he says. On the couch, a reupholstered, vintage something, she does.

 

 

 

Isaac gets the door for himself, without even knocking. Lydia has been counting stitches on the rug at her feet for ten minutes when her thoughts are scattered, violently, by the click and the crunch that comes from a lock being forced. She sees the blade’s edge of his claw disappear back into his hand before she looks up to confront his face.

 

‘Lydia,’ he says.

 

‘Isaac.’

 

They talk about exactly nothing while Stiles stands on the other side of the door to the kitchen and wishes that he could disappear.

 

 

 

Scott barrels in with Erica on his heels, through a door that’s been left partially open to the cold. Lydia and Isaac both turn, simultaneously relieved, the fragmented eggshells of their conversation abandoned.

 

‘Scott,’ Lydia says, standing. ‘Where’s Allison?’

 

He smiles. ‘Different cars.’ And then he pretends not to see her eyes darken at the implications. He’s too tired to say anything of weight, so he doesn’t. He moves a throw cushion out of the way so that Erica can sit, but she blows right past him as though he isn’t even there.

 

She hasn’t brought a date, though they all know that she could have. Some guy she knows or some guy she doesn’t, who she pulled over on the side of the road and told to get in the car. She goes most places with a man on her arm, lately, because it’s easier, and that she doesn’t, here, is a testament to the ways that the very same things that make you real to other people fall apart, ragged, the second you ask them to stand the test of people that you truly know.

 

She sits down on the other side of the room from Isaac, like a girl who only sits next to her brother on occasions where she does not feel at home. He smiles at her, over the edge of his glass, but the glare from the overhead light and his white front teeth distort it so that for a moment she thinks that she’s staring at the edge of a knife.

 

 

 

She only asks if she can help because it’s taking so long, and because she can hear Stiles come to a stop on the other side of the door every time someone comes in. Since greeting her, he hasn’t shown his face, whether simply because she was first at the door or because there was always something tepid between them, words exchanged quietly at the dance or her smarts kept secret in the palm of his hand. She can cook, too. But she doesn’t want to.

 

The door swings both ways, and when she pushes it open it creaks, so that Stiles turns around and looks right at her.

 

Behind her, Erica spits out the punch line to her joke onto a silver cocktail napkin. The whole room laughs.

 

‘Can I help with anything?’ The oven mits are stacked neatly one on top of the other. The room smells of meatloaf. There is a string of pearls strung across Lydia’s neck.

 

‘I’m fine,’ he says. ‘I’m fine.’ As though repeating himself might make her go away.

 

She leans up against the counter, beside a stack of clean white plates. They speak at the same time. ‘You’ve done a wonder on the house.’ Short, choppy sentences.

 

‘How’s Boston, anyway?’

 

She frowns. ‘It’s fine. It’s the teaching hospitals, really, that are—fine.’

 

‘It’s all fine, isn’t it?’ He opens the over and shuts it again.

 

‘Laugh a little, Stiles,’ she says. ‘Erica just told a joke.’

 

He smiles, and the air shatters like glass between them, loud and sharp and messy, and it takes her a moment to realize that the plates have fallen, that there’s not a whole one among the wreck.

 

In the other room, Scott hears the china clatter over the sound of Erica raking her fingers through her hair. He pushes open the door.

 

Lydia is kneeling on the ground beside a pile of broken plates, determinedly picking up the pieces one by one and placing them in her outstretched palm. When she looks up and sees Scott watching, her face contorts; she begins to cry. He notices that Stiles has turned away.

 

‘Are you—‘ Scott begins, but Lydia frantically shakes her head.

 

‘I’m fine,’ she says. ‘I’m fine.’ Until Scott turns away and leaves them there.

 

It’s not until the door swings shut that he hears Stiles whisper, ‘Thank you.’ A few moments later, he steps out of the kitchen.

 

‘Lydia’s helping with dinner,’ he says. Isaac asks what kind of wood the cabinets are made out of.

 

 

 

Allison practically falls in through the door the moment that Stiles opens it, but to his credit he does not flinch away. Instead, he catches her, laughing, until Scott reaches their side and lifts her up off the ground. She squeals, a sound that fills the entire house and forces all of them to turn and look.

 

‘You’re all in black,’ Stiles says. ‘What are you mourning?’ And the entire room all together holds their breath in all at once.

 

Allison doesn’t falter. ‘Scott proposing to me,’ she says, holding up her left hand and wiggling her ring finger, around which sits a band that dwarfs her slender fingers entirely. She seems made clumsy by the  wait of it, falling over herself coming into the other room even as they’re all still laughing at her joke.

 

It weighs the rest of them down, too. As a collective, they cannot usually be drawn and quartered into parts. Even Isaac and Erica, for whatever their alliance is, it crumbles her amidst the rest of them. And yet Scott and Allison, who sit side by side now with their fingers intertwined, are something hard and strong and impenetrable—unattainable.

 

‘Food’s up,’ Lydia says.

 

She grasps at her finger for the ghost of a ring for the entire rest of the evening.

 

 

 

Isaac tells a good story. It’s long, and kind of sad, and tempered around the edges with all the things that they know about him. And his father. He never says his father’s name, but he’s in the story too, in all the empty pauses and time left out for breathing. He’s there in the way that Lydia tries to scratch a hole through her wine glass, and in the cracks between Scott’s fingers when he reaches for Allison’s hand underneath the table.

 

The food is delicious, and it tastes like ash in Erica’s mouth.

 

‘I guess it felt like I had always been waiting for Derek,’ Isaac finishes.

 

Stiles smiles; Lydia waits for something to fall. That’s all it is though. Waiting for Derek. But it’s Isaac’s father, not Derek, cooked into all the burnt parts of the meatloaf that Lydia shaved off in the kitchen just a half hour before.

 

 

 

Jackson shows. That in itself is a feat, so Stiles isn’t offended when Jackson hands him the bottle of wine and then turns around to leave. Outside, the house is much the same as it always was, and the warm cream of the inside leaking out just a bit around Stiles’s feet like a bloodstain.

 

‘I’m sorry,’ Jackon says. ‘I can’t.’

 

Inside, Allison, laughing, comes to stand behind Stiles in the door. _I can’t._

 

‘Come in,’ she says, smiling. She puts a hand on Stile’s shoulder, and he can tell that it’s the hand with the ring because it feels as though it is weighing him down. Jackson glances at it, then quickly looks away.

 

‘I can’t,’ he says again, and Stiles wants to tell him that he can’t, either, but the two of them have always spoken vastly different languages. This one, a difference that Lydia could never translate. In the other room, she is laughing, and it sounds like falling plates.

 

‘Please,’ Allison says, but Jackson simply shakes his head.

 

In the car behind him, Stiles can see Danny silhouetted inside. Jackson follows his gaze. It’s not what you think, his eyes say, but Jackson has never cared what anyone else thinks, so Stiles doesn’t say a word.

 

‘It’s not what you think,’ Stiles says softly, referring to this evening and these people and the house and the fact that Jackson was invited at all. Adulthood suddenly seems so hollow, when he realizes how little has changed, and Jackson has already fled down the steps and Allison’s soft, ring-weighted hand is already pulling him back inside.

 

 

 

Allison can’t remember who suggests they play a card game. She just feels herself unfold, all of her limbs, and the cards have these little tiny bumps on the back when she holds them in her palms. She can feel the warmth of Scott’s shoulder next to her, but it’s Stiles she’s watching, who seems bowed all the way over in his seat.

 

‘Bullshit!’ Scott calls.

 

Allison starts. ‘ _Excuse_ me?’

 

But Erica is already leaning forward to collect the pile of cards in the middle. Allison imagines that she can heard her fingertips gliding over every last bump. Scott probably can.

 

Stiles puts down four Jacks, and nobody says a thing.

 

It’s Allison’s turn, and for some reason she’s holding a Joker.

 

 

 

Erica is telling another dirty joke, at which Isaac laughs and Lydia smiles with disapproving lips pressed tight together. Allison and Scott are talking in low tones. Stiles reads the label on the wine that Jackson handed to him and wondered if he soaked a sponge in lukewarm water, how long it would take for him to gently press the label off.

 

He doesn’t know what he’s thinking anymore. All of his emotions come to him in abstract terms now, in memories and moments that he’s see in movies, and scent memories that he has tried hard to forget.

 

‘What if someone,’ he says suddenly, ‘is just so sad that there isn’t anything they can do about it, that they just carry it around inside of them forever and let it dictate everything they do?’

 

No one says a thing. Around them, the old house creaks, and none of its new trappings do a thing to spare the sound. It sounds like the moments before another person starts to cry, when you just sit there and hope that if you look at your feet nothing will happen.

 

Stiles doesn’t start to cry, but Allison does.

 

Scott moves to put his hand on the back of her head, but Erica gets there first. Her arms come up so quickly that even she seems surprised. Isaac drags his finger along the edge of his place so that it squeaks. Lydia looks away, embarrassed.

 

Five years, it turns out, is a long time. They’ve all lived it, too, no matter how much or little they have said this evening about what that living has been. Whether they’ve lived it alone, or together, or trying to love a house with two graves out front as though it were a person, it’s been lived. And no matter how many times you say living live lived it’s not the same as alive.

 

‘I think a lot of people live that way,’ Scott says, finally. ‘Or lived.’

 

Stiles picks up his empty glass and stares at the last dregs of Jackson’s wine in the bottom of his glass.

 

‘To Derek,’ he says quietly, and doesn’t have to say anything else about a man whose worth is evidenced by the scattered pieces that he’s left behind, by the way Jackson wouldn’t stay and Erica came alone and Isaac told a story full of empty missing people; by the way that Scott and Allison are going to be married and that sits like a rock at the bottom of everyone’s stomachs, by the way that Lydia helped with dinner and pretended to cry and the way that Stiles actually did.

 

‘To Derek.’

 

It’s a waste. It’s not enough. Stiles will throw what’s left of the food away later, alone, in a house that he fixed up because he could pretend it was a person. A house with two graves, five years, and death, a thing that can’t be quantified, settling in like a blanket of dust over everything.


End file.
